The Natural Mind

Something I read about years ago that I must dig out sometime and re-read (how often I find myself saying that!) was to do with the way drug habits stabilise. Pretty much any drug; smokers are junkies as much as the smackhead or the prescription valium addict ("She goes running for the Shelter \ of her Mother's little helper...").

I'm sure it was in a book called "The Natural Mind" by Dr Andrew Weil. I've not read any of Dr Weil's later books, judging by their covers and his public appearances he cashed-in on the New-Age epidemic in the 80's. But I haven't read them so I can't be sure.

"The Natural Mind" was written in the early 70's (append 'iirc' to all statements made in this post) when as a young post-graduate student he faced opposition to the 'scientific investigation' of altering consciousness, both chemically and naturally. It is a well-balanced treatise on the whys and wherefores , the benefits and the pitfalls, and I would suggest one of the essential pre-requisit readings for anyone wishing to embark on a journey into their own internal states by whatever means.

Drug addiction goes something like this. You start taking a drug. It either mimics a chemical the body produces naturally so the body stops producing that chemical itself (why bother when there's a ready external source available) and / or the body starts producing more 'pleasure receptors' for the drug. Either way, the dosage needs to increase to satisfy the deficit and to accomodate the new receptors until a saturation point is reached. At that level the addiction stabilises... a pack a day, two caps of Hammer, a bottle of scotch, everything is happy.

Coming off a drug, the opposite happens; you reduce the dose, and until the body re-learns how to produce that chemical again, until the extra receptors die off, the body craves with a persistent, gnawing, longing to be dosed up again. The irritability. The sweaty sleeplessness. The purging from all orifices. The DT's. The pain of withdrawl.

I've succeeded in eliminating the habit of smoking from the working week. When I began, this took up to 20 pieces of nicotine gum a day. That has now reduced to 6. Weekends are a combination of cigarettes and gum - beer that is anything but beer flavoured is simply evil. One packet for the weekend, I'll cop to two if you like. It's been that way for 6-8 weeks now (an important part of the game is not to count time too accurately), so the addiction is currently re-stabilised at a lower level.

'Lighter' cigarettes don't work (for me), I just pull out the filter and smoke more of them. Soon it will be time to see if lighter gum (2mg instead of 4mg) does. It's difficult to know how much less (if at all) nicotine I'm ingesting since where you get 4mg of nicotine from 4mg gum, you absorb far less than 16mg from a 16mg cigarette. Interrupting the habituation has gone well. Soon we shall see what impact we've had on the addiction.